Ilona is a student at the University of Southern California studying Media Arts & Practice in the film school with a strong interest in computer science. She's a three time engineering intern for Google, having worked on infrastructure for the Google Voice Assistant in 2016, frontend for Google Express in 2017, and release engineering tools&infrastructure for Google Cloud in 2018. In the past, she's done cool things like TAing for Girls Who Code at Pixar Animation Studios, discussing important issues with tech leaders and educators at the White House CS Tech Jam, and cofounding AthenaHacks, SoCal's largest all-female (trans & nonbinary inclusive) hackathon. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her family, drawing, hiking, playing the piano, and listening to her roommate play the guitar.
Everyone uses technology, and being able to harness its power through computer science means you can have a huge impact on how the world around you works. We need a population of engineers that's representative of the population of the world so that we can create software that is as humane, as non-discriminatory, and as strong and secure as possible. Computer science is so interdisciplinary - from creating algorithms to detect cancer to building robots to creating animated movies and games - that you can constantly challenge yourself and explore new topics. Coding is fun, it's dynamic, it's in high demand, and it's everywhere.
